The Art of the City by Milani Raffaele; Federici Corrado;

The Art of the City by Milani Raffaele; Federici Corrado;

Author:Milani, Raffaele; Federici, Corrado; [Milani, Raffaele; Federici, Corrado;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780773551336
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: 2017-01-15T07:00:00+00:00


BORDERS AND MARGINS

Placing ourselves at the city limits and imagining we are living outside, in an out-of-the-way place, walking along the margins, among the buildings of an endless suburb, poised in the midst of buildings, as though in a comic strip or cartoon, is an exciting, thrilling adventure. It is also, however, a way of looking at the city from a certain distance, with both the body and the imagination. Many youths feel and yearn for this pleasure of being physically on the margins, in a neutral zone in which they can roam. This is one meaning of the term “margin,” but there are others as well that create a different, strange effect, inside the city itself rather than on its borders. I am referring to the places of the marginalized and the excluded, the new dispossessed people: the new “courts of miracles.” When we arrive in Rome and Naples by train or car, from the windows we see figures moving among tiny shacks and makeshift tents on patches of grass near intersections, under bridges, along railroad tracks covered by reeds and wild shrubs mixed with garbage, or along dry drainage ditches. They approach us like unreal human silhouettes with dirty faces, wearing dirty clothes. We are reminded of characters in Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre-Dame: beggars in the court of miracles. We learn that poverty is still with us, just a few metres away, and that we tend not to be aware of it. What, then, is this feeling of unease and disorientation we get on the train or in the car, we who are the children of affluence and opulence?

We need to ask ourselves what the margins of the city in the age of globalization are. What is expanding and swallowing up the built-up areas, the seat of citizenship? Does a spirit of the city that can give meaning to life for half of the earth’s population still exist? What forms do the megacities take in an historical epoch that has chosen to do away with rural culture? These questions concern both the present and the future and are prompted by actions, things, and people as we look for signs of community in transformation. This includes material and immaterial objects, such as the five senses, like taste and food, as well as the traces of the performance and organization of social life. In both its human project and its real dehumanization, the contemporary city is like a cloud of relationships, representations, and actions, but it is also smells and tastes. It is a drifting cloud, which, if its dense particles are studied, displays the spectra of life, infinite forms of work and social dreams, thus highlighting the betrayal of technologies that appear to solve the problems of misery, poverty, and the degradation of people and things. In such a scenario where all problems are solved, we find the cold artificiality of multinationals, to which we can respond only by immersing ourselves in everyday life in order to understand it thoroughly.



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